Category Archives: Beckett

Perhaps I am equal to the relatively trifling act of organisation that is all that is needed to turn this dereliction, profoundly felt, into literature.

— Beckett (diary 1937), in Knowlson, Damned to Fame

…enormous prison, like a hundred thousand cathedrals, never anything else any more, from this time forth, and in it, somewhere, perhaps, riveted, tiny, the prisoner, how can he be found, how false this space is, what falseness instantly … it’s like a confession, a last confession, you think it’s finished, then it starts off again, there were so many sins, the memory is so bad, the words don’t come, the words fail, the breath fails, no, it’s something else, it’s an indictment, a dying voice accusing, accusing me, you must accuse someone, a culprit is indispensable, it speaks of my sins, it speaks of my head, it says its mine…

— Beckett, The Unnamable

It only means that there will be a new form, and that this form will be of such a type that it admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else. The form and the chaos remain separate. The latter is not reduced to the former. That is why the form itself becomes a preoccupation, because it exists as a problem separate from the material it accommodates. To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.

— Beckett (via A Piece of Monologue)

To class Beckett himself as the simple incarnation of ‘despair’ is a drastic oversimplification. To begin with, the concept of ‘despair’ implies the existence of a related concept ‘hope,’ and ‘hope’ implies a certain predictable continuity in time—which continuity Beckett would seriously question. ‘Despair,’ with all its inherent moral overtones, is a term which is wholly inadequate to describe Beckett’s attitude towards the human condition; nor is this condition, in the most current sense of the definition, ‘absurd.’ It is literally and logically impossible. And in this central concept of ‘impossibility,’ his thought has most of its origins – as does also his art.

— Richard Coe (via A Piece of Monologue)

‘Have contemporary philosophers had any influence on your thought?’
‘I never read philosophers.’
‘Why not?’
‘I never understand anything they write.’
‘All the same, people have wondered if the existentialists’ problem of being may afford a key to your works.’
‘There’s no key or problem. I wouldn’t have had any reason to write my novels if I could have expressed their subject in philosophic terms.’

— Interview with Beckett (via A Piece of Monologue)

Decidedly this evening I shall say nothing that is not false, I mean nothing that is not calculated to leave me in doubt as to my real intentions.

— Beckett, Malone Dies

For it if was really day again already, in some low distant quarter of the sky, it was not yet day again already in the kitchen. But that would come, Watt knew that would come, with patience it would come, little by little, whether he liked it or not, over the yard wall, and through the window, first the grey, then the brighter colours one by one, until getting on to nine a.m. all the gold and white and blue would fill the kitchen, all the unsoiled light of the new day, of the new day at last, the day without precedent at last.

— Beckett, Watt (quoted here)

The grown-ups pursued me, the just, caught me, beat me, hounded me back into the round, the game, the jollity. For I was already in the toils of earnestness. That has been my disease. I was born grave as others syphilitic. And gravely I struggled to be grave no more, to live, to invent, I know what I mean. But at each fresh attempt I lost my head, fled to my shadows as to sanctuary, to his lap who can neither live nor suffer the sight of others living.

— Beckett, Malone Dies

If this continues it is myself I shall lose and the thousand ways that lead there. And I shall resemble the wretches famed in fable, crushed beneath the weight of their wish come true. And I even feel a wish come over me, the desire to know what I am doing, and why. So I near the goal I set myself in my young days and which prevented me from living. And on the threshold of being no more I succeed in being another. Very pretty.

— Beckett, Malone Dies

And at the thought of the punishments Youdi might inflict upon me I was seized by such a mighty fit of laughter that I shook, with mighty silent laughter and my features composed in their wonted sadness and calm. But my whole body shook, and even my legs, so that I had to lean against a tree, or against a bush, when the fit came on me standing, my umbrella being no longer sufficient to keep me from falling. Strange laughter truly, and no doubt misnamed, through indolence perhaps, or ignorance. And as for myself, that unfailing pastime, I must say it was far now from my thoughts. But there were moments when it did not seem so far from me, when I seemed to be drawing towards it as the sands towards the waves, when it crests and whitens, though I must say this image hardly fitted my situation, which was rather that of the turd waiting for the flush.

– Beckett, Molloy